


The Sky Itself is Ringing

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Emperor's Winding Sheet - Jill Paton Walsh, Undisclosed Fandom
Genre: Constantinople, Family, Fish, Gen, Theology, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:07:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28268856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Constantinople's eunuchs were powerful men, court officials, warriors, and priests. Most were cut as young boys, slaves from the Black Sea or from Africa, but some chose to pay the price to enter the privileged world of palaces and politics.Stephanos chose.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Sky Itself is Ringing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Daegaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/gifts).



There had been hope, at the beginning, but at the end it seemed as if the Virgin herself had turned her face from the city. Abandoned by every other power in Christendom, in those last dark nights of the Turkish siege salvation was a hopeless myth, and redemption sophistry. Rumours were as common as rats. For the desperate, anything could be an augury, the flight of geese or a starved seagull, a spluttering lamp, or the blurred vision of Mary the Mother of God wreathed in incense and swimming in the fire of a thousand candles, demanding that the Emperor relinquish the Imperium. The unseasonable storms, beating against the cracked walls, flooding the rubble-filled ditches of the defensive wall and the stripped-bare fields, fraying nerves and embroidered stoles alike, were as much an enemy as the Turks at the gate.

In the tent Stephanos had had pitched for the Emperor, near to the threatened walls and beyond the range of the cannons, they did not discuss fear.

"Make sure you get some rest," the Emperor commanded, although he would not offer himself the same kindness. A single brazier held the night at bay; rain was a drum-beat against the thin silks of the tent.

"My Lord," Stephanos said, head bowed.

He would not. He had other obligations that night, and fully dressed down to his boots behind the screen counted under his breath until he thought the Emperor must surely slumber.

The boy Vrethiki did sleep, limbs splayed on the straw paillasse in the way of the young, exhausted and careless. His face carried no trace of the beard that would, if God allowed, shadow his chin in later years; his eyelids were pale and blue-veined. Stephanos, stooping, made the sign of the cross, three fingers, right to left, a plea he had long since set aside on his own account. And then straightening, caught the flicker of the Emperor's gaze.

Better discovered leaving, he thought, than his lord awaking to find him gone. He touched the hilt of his sword, and nodded. The Emperor, unsmiling, put out his hand - whether to stop him, or in blessing, Stephanos did not know: he caught it - his Lord's fingers, with the sword-callouses as hard as walnut shell - and kissed it, pressing his lips against the knuckles as if fervour alone could bind them both to this mortal life. Eunuchs, it was said, stood between the sacred and the profane, sanctified by chastity, servants to the divine. It was a lonely stance. Yet he had colleagues, and sometimes friends.

"Go safely," said the Emperor, the personification of the divine, the only one of his kind. "And come back to me, Stephanos."

"I shall," Stephanos swore. "I swear. I shall." It was not he who loosened his grip, but their hands fell apart, and the Emperor, considerate even in this moment, looked away. Stephanos could not bring himself to turn away. He backed out of the Emperor's presence as if they were lodged in the gilded bedchambers of the Palace, lit by candelabra and scented by rose petals. Anointed, by God.

Under the silk tent, he had ordered carpets laid over the wooden floor, but step outside and mud oozed under every footprint. Wind caught at his cloak and rain splattered against his face, as cold as if the clouds had rolled from the ice-bound north with the Rus and their fur-lined sledges. Stephanos ducked his head into the storm, and walked along paths he had known long ago as a boy, if not, he thought, with a familiar ache so irrelevent now that it barely pained him, as a man. He skirted the old harbour, Theodosius' harbour, its great stone sea walls guarded by barely willing Genose sailers. The harbour was silted now, and the boats sparse. The village was a thing of wooden huts huddled in lots that had once been merchant's houses and taverns. Here in the hinterlands, just as the city walls had been used by lodging houses and workshops, fishermen and fishwives had leaned homes of scavanged planks and bleached driftwood against the stone of the coastal defences. The wall hid the light reflected from the sea, the moon was a glimmer behind the scudding clouds, and Stephanos's lantern was dark. He thought he had mislaid himself - had mislaid himself years ago - but then he nearly fell over the empty firepit, and the glow basket, and looked up to the bare steel of his father's gutting knife and his father's eyes behind it fierce and dark as an eagle's.

"Abba."

The old man grunted. Greek was his second language; his first was a tribal dialect from the hills beyond the Black Sea, a secret language, the language of night, shared only with Stephanos' mother.

"Abba, it's I."

"I can see that."

But it was a heartbeat, two, three, apprehensive and aching, before the knife lowered.

"I'm sorry," Stephanos whispered. "I'm sorry I didn't come before."

"It's a long way from the palace," his father said. Then he said, "Sit. Your mother would never forgive me if you left hungry."

Stephanos' mother has been dead so long he can barely remember the scent of her hair, in the space she left behind. He sat. He was weighted with purpose, and he had left the Emperor alone, but he was his mother's child still. He sat.

Byzantium's fisherfolk row out into the night in the slender, shallow boats of the Bospherous, glow-basket slung from the prow, spears readied. The fish are drawn to the light in a glint of silver bellies and golden scales, the summer feast of bonitos, the swift dappled mackrel, the occasional red-tinged porcelet with its whiskers and rounded fins. Fishing at night takes a steady hand and a keen eye. Stephanos' father had both. His hands were steady then, as in quick sure strokes he gutted a pair of small, fat trout, speared them on twigs, and set the flesh over the embers. He dropped the heads into the stockpot. Stephanos' father opened oysters with the flick of the tip of his knife, levered limpets from the shore rocks, picked flesh from crab claws, and diced herbs and beans as easily as any palace chef. In the winter, he had whittled boats and horses for his small sons.

Stephanos' father had looked him in the eyes when the knife had made its cut, and not looked away.

"I saw you," said his father. "When the Emperor rode into the city. I thought to see you in the baggage train, but you were at his shoulder."

"I didn't know to look for you," said Stephanos. He had not thought he would know anyone in the crowd. The whole thing had passed like a dream. The golden gate; the banners; the cheers; the fervent protestations of faith and fealty; his lord's straight back under the weight of the divine crown, and the slump of his shoulders when he laid it down.

His father shredded a spray of dill, and seasoned the trout. "You had other concerns," he said. "And I thought - it is no small thing to see one's son in silk and gold. I always wondered, and then I knew. But there's no place in the palace for such as I."

"I would have found somewhere," said Stephanos. He would have been lying, a month ago. Now everything was possible. The Emperor lived in a tent. He had learned to wield his sword as if it were the missing parts of himself.

"This is my home," said his father. "And - Dion died on the wall a month ago, and his wife left her girls with me. Ionna is the one with the red hair and the temper. Galla is the quiet one, like you." His father was smiling. He was not a young man: lines mapped the shape of his laugh, and the way he squinted into the sun, and the long years between them, which had not been easy. But he smiled.

"I'm glad they have you," Stephanos said, and then, "I'm sorry about Dion," Grief, though, felt rote, and muted. There were so many dead.

His father shrugged. Then he said, "They say the Palace school takes girls."

"What?" To enrol in the Palace school, as Stephanos did, one had to be noble, or gelded.

"The Sultan's school," his father said. "The Madrassa."

In this one place where he had, once, been wholely himself, Stephanos felt the bland acquiescence of his training wash across his face. He was too well schooled for the tone of his voice to change. "Yes," he said. "Yes. In the Harem, they educate the girls. There is - they will teach them writing, and embroidery, and perfume making, mathematics, and the management of households... I spoke to such a woman, in Mistra," he said. "She was veiled, and behind a screen, so that she had the advantage of me." It is the living, he thought, who matter. "If - if the Emperor marries-"

His father sliced a lemon, a small, wizened thing, but a real lemon such as the Emperor's house had not seen for weeks. The scent of it was bitter-sweet against the salt-savour of the fish, and the ash of the Turkish campfires.

The Emperor will not marry.

"I brought this for you." At the palace he had a chest of silks, and an illustrated manauscript with jewel-bright minature paintings, and a spray of dried flowers, pressed in parchment, that he had been given one violet evening, looking across the causeway to Monemvasia... There was no time for memories or gold. Here, he had some coins, and a pair of amber earrings, and the queer emerald seal with the dolphin on it he had never used, but loved. A handful of trinkets, to secure a future for his father, and the two girls. He tugged the purse out of his sash, and handed it to his father. "This is for you. For the girls."

"We don't-"

"I will not need it again," said Stephanos.

His father looked at him. The trout, searing, dripped oil into the fire, so that it spluttered, and the dill sprigs blackened and curled. Eventually, his father nodded, and tucked the purse into his robe. Then he reached for a couple of wooden bowls, and shoveled a fish in each.

"They say the Sultan ransoms his prisoners," said his father.

The fish was juicy, picquant with lemon. The little bones crunched between his teeth.

He had thought he'd perfected the impassive care of the older courtiers, but his father's face was - drawn.

"Abba."

"You think I don't know how to speak to the Sultan?" his father said.

His father had found him a place in the Palace, years before, under a different Emperor and before a different god.

"He will kill you," Stephanos said. He thought of the Turkish scholars he has known, the travelling map-maker, the doctor in Mistra. The officer captured in the mine, who had been so afraid. "He will think you the Emperor's man."

"So? What does it matter to me whose head wears the crown? I'm a fisherman, not a philosopher," said his father.

"So was our lord Christ," said Stephanos. "And he died, just the same."

"Then he'll understand," said his father. "Besides, the Sultan has enough to worry about, hui? Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi; icons, no icons; fully human, fully divine; Greek creed, Latin creed -I tell you, if that fishmonger Philostratus wants to spend another night shovelling stone telling me how the Holy Spirit came from God alone, I'm going to tell him it's because Christ was shooting blanks."

"That's not...an argument I have heard before," said Stephanos.

"They haven't thought of that one? All those Patriarchs and Cardinals and Popes and the Emperor, too? It'll be the gold. Better to be poor: gold dazzles the eyes."

"There is little enough left of it now," said Stephanos.

"There'll be none of it left, soon enough," said his father. He picked at his teeth. "But it's easier working on the walls when you know you'll have a full belly at the end of it, empty treasury notwithstanding. The old Empress picked the right brother for us there - can't see Demosthenes thinking of anything other than his own crown."

"He's a good man," said Stephanos.

"It's not a good man we need," said his father. "It's a good Emperor."

"I thought it didn't matter to you who wore the crown," said Stephanos.

There was a moment's silence, and then the old man croaked, a husk of laugh. In low light of the embers the lines on his face deepened, like the creases in a handful of silk, lit by laughter. "Should've known not to argue with a Byzantine," he said, wheezing. "You always were a stubborn little thing. Like your mother. Never would take no for an answer."

Stephanos did not answer. In the fire basket, the embers hissed and spluttered, and he drew his cloak closer as a splattering of rain blew across the seashore, on a wind that carried with it the smell of thousands of campfires. It was the ash that made his eyes smart, that, and the salt from the sea.

"Did I do right?" said his father.

"What?"

"When you told me to - when you said you wanted to go to the palace."

It seemed so many years ago, and yet his belly clenched with the pain of it.

"That bastard eunuch," hissed his father, his eyes narrowed. "That false teacher! Filling your head with stories. Admiral Theoktistos! General Narses! It's not cutting your balls off that makes a man a general. A man can fight with or without - just because the man's a hero to every palace page-"

"I learned to fight," said Stephanos. "We all did, in the palace courtyards. I studied, I served two good men chosen by God, and I have seen wonders and beauty I could not have imagined." He thinks of the households and palaces he has governed, the honing of skills in half a dozen languages, the strategic hospitality offered to half a hundred embassies, the politics and theologies and through them all the shining thread of his own steadfast loyalty, returned. "I have no regrets."

"You love him then, your Emperor."

"Yes," said Stephanos. He thought, briefly, of the boy Vrethiki, who if fate had been different, might have been his son, and of other men he might have loved. Men died, he thought, or lived, and the City carried on.

"I must go."

"There is always a place for you here," said his father. "When the wall falls. If your heart fails you. If-"

"Thank you," said Stephanos. "Abba, thank you."

"I know they have sung the last mass," said his father, "But go with God."

"You too," said Stephanos. The moon had risen over the sea wall, so that he could see the pale blue of his father's eyes, and the fish-spears leaning against the doorway, and the nets. This might have been his life, and instead, at the heart of all things, he had seen the glories of the world.

The moon was still waxing, and the City would not fall until it waned. He pulled his cloak around him, and nodded, and went back to the war.

**Author's Note:**

> _God rings the bells, earth rings the bells, the sky itself is ringing  
>  The Holy Wisdom, the Great Church, is ringing out the message  
> Four hundred sounding boards sound out, and two and sixty bells.  
> For every bell there is a priest, and for every priest a deacon.  
> To the left the emperor is singing, to the right the patriarch..._
> 
> _The Last Mass in Hagia Sophia_ , folksong, collected by C. A. Trypanis and translated from the Greek by Richard Stoneham.


End file.
